For decades, conservatives used the “liberal” moniker as a bludgeon to demonize and marginalize its opponents. It didn’t work this time. It didn’t work against Obama. It didn’t work against Mark Udall in his Colorado senate race even though they tried to label him “Boulder liberal Mark Udall.”

“I suspect that the heyday of using ‘liberal’ as an attack word is over,” said George P. Lakoff, a University of California, Berkeley cognitive linguistics professor. “It has pretty much gone out of use, except by conservatives that are attacking people.”

A recent Pew Study showed that liberal Democrats are engaging in activisim more than other partisan and ideological groups. Tod Lindberg of the Hoover Institute, and a McCain adviser, acknowedges that the “center-right” meme to which conservatives are clinging is a myth. We are in “center-left times.”

A new generation of voters, coming of age on Facebook and Twitter, don’t care about these kinds of labels. They communicate with global friends who they never meet or see. They don’t know or care about their skin color, their sexual orientation, and whether they are liberal or conservative. Obama and his team knew how to use these new communication platforms to create not just an Internet donor base, but also a social network that he can now commicate with directly, bringing true democracy to a whole new level.